Coun. Jyoti Gondek pushed to pause the idea until council consulted with Calgary's police commission, but a council committee voted 4-3 to move the proposal along.

A city council committee pushed forward a proposal Tuesday to set up a public safety task force in response to a spate of gun violence in Calgary — but the move didn’t come without friction.

Coun. Jyoti Gondek called it “troubling” that the motion from Coun. George Chahal and Mayor Naheed Nenshi was introduced without consulting the Calgary police commission, which she sits on as a council representative.

“To completely forget about police commission and not engage them before a notice of motion like this comes out would be the equivalent of asking for more streets in Calgary and not talking to the transportation department,” she said in an interview.

The task force would engage community members, including police, to look at violence-prevention programs in Calgary and beyond. They would also report back to council with recommendations on how to reduce gang and gun-related violence.

Gondek said that work shouldn’t start until council has a better sense of what the Calgary Police Service and police commission are already doing. During Tuesday’s priorities and finance committee meeting, Gondek asked to pause the plan until council has a meeting with commission members behind closed doors.

“There’s no rush for this from what I can see,” Gondek said. “There has been no conversation with police commission, the body that is responsible for oversight.”

Coun. Jyoti Gondek.Darren Makowichuk /
Postmedia

Nenshi took umbrage at the idea that the proposal could wait.

“I’m actually kind of aghast at this conversation. Anyone who says this is not urgent has not been talking to people in the community who don’t feel safe,” he said.

“We had 80 — eight-zero — shooting incidents in Calgary in 2019; 2020 is looking even more dangerous than that,” he continued. “It’s absolutely within council’s authority to set up a task force to talk to members of the public.”

There were four homicides and multiple shootings in just the first two week of this year.

Gondek apologized for the way she used the word “rush,” saying she meant there was no hurry to make sure the meeting with police commission and council’s upcoming vote are on the same day. If that happens, she worried there wouldn’t be enough time to fully consider the issue, she explained.

The committee ultimately agreed to move the idea ahead to council in a 4-3 vote. Councillors Gondek, Sean Chu and Jeromy Farkas were opposed.

As the other council representative on police commission, Farkas said he also worried the task force’s work could be redundant.

“I don’t doubt Coun. Chahal’s sincerity. . . . It’s the job of every single member of council to be able to bring forward their ideas for fair sounding from council. That said, I would argue it is really the Calgary police commission’s role. I would argue that we already have a public safety task force and it is the police commission.”

“This is much larger than just a police commission or Calgary Police Service issue,” he said. “This is about community, about looking at other opportunities to bring stakeholders together, and I think that’s really important for the public to know.”

He added that he shared his motion with the rest of council last week and didn’t get any feedback.

Premier Jason Kenney also addressed gun violence in Calgary on Tuesday, telling reporters that the provincial government is willing to contribute to the city’s task force and find ways to curb violence, especially in the northeast.

But Kenney called for harsher penalties and more enforcement to crack down on drug trafficking, saying it’s “no secret” that the spike in gun violence is “highly related to criminal drug activity, to drug gangs engaged in turf warfare.”

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